Wall Street Journal op-ed slams RH Bill!

THIS POST, ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON JULY 25, WILL STAY ON TOP UNTIL AUGUST 1, 2012. NEWER POSTS BELOW!

(Update 7/28/12: the entire article has been published by the website of the Office of the President of the Philippines.)

On July 24, 2012 the Wall Street Journal published an article on economic reform in the Philippines with the title Keeping the Philippine Dream Alive. This article is currently available only to subscribers. However, I've been able to read the whole article and, incredibly, it contains the following put-down of the RH bill (emphases mine):

Mr. Aquino still hasn't found a way to overcome political opposition to more mining investments, a problem given the contribution the country's mineral wealth could make to growth if it could be extracted. And his promotion of a "reproductive health" bill is jarring because it would put the Philippines in danger of following China's path into middle-income development followed by a demographic trap of too few workers. The Philippines doesn't have too many people, it has too few pro-growth policies.

As the pro-life side has been saying all along, the problem is not the number of people, but economic and social policies. 

Will we really continue to overflow with new students? The reality about our birth rate

For more on the Wall Street Journal op-ed referenced here, see this: Wall Street Journal op-ed slams RH bill!

Your bosses, the schoolchildren
By: Antonio Montalvan II
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Monday, July 30th, 2012

“You must also tell it like it is,” President Aquino, in a foul mood, was heard castigating media at the recent anniversary celebration of “TV Patrol,” a prime-time news program. That’s what we think: He must tell it like it is by getting his facts right, especially in a State of the Nation Address.

The shortage of classrooms, desks and textbooks will be over, but “sikapin nating huwag uling magka-backlog dahil sa dami ng estudyante.” This is the nuance of that statement: More students are coming into our schools even as we address the backlog.

What kind of selective data is being whispered into his ears? Reading the litany of statistics on his teleprompter (impressive), the President could not have missed one glaring data from the National Statistics Office (NSO). The multisectoral nationwide Alliance for the Family Foundation Philippines Inc. (ALFI) took note of this discrepancy by comparing it to the government data from the NSO.

The data, easily accessed through the NSO website (www.census.gov.ph/data/sectordata/datavs.html), tell us that since the year 2000, the number of babies born every year has actually stopped increasing. Moreover, this has even dropped by 2.2 percent to 1.745 million babies born in 2009 as against 1.784 million babies born in 2008.